Mob Psycho S2E8 "Even Then ~Continue Forward~"

A fluffy episode with a buried lede. This one tricks you into thinking its going to be a cute-but-skippable slice of life one-off before dropping the hammer. The teaser telegraphs this well, if subtly, showing an incident from Mob and Ritsu's childhoods and an early expression of Mob's powers.

Babby Mob's most impressive display of telekinesis to date at that point was triggered by him falling in the grass and skinning his knee. It's an encapsulation of things we've seen before, with Mob's "???" rampages being triggered by intense fear, pain, or stress, Ritsu's initial empowered arc having him seek shame and self-hatred in order to boost his power, and of course Mogami literally traveling the country hunting for pain and suffering to absorb to make himself stronger. Psionics might not be fundamentally fuelled by pain, but pain is clearly the most potent choice of fuel for them.

Perhaps that's why angry, violent ghosts are so common, and peaceful ones are much rarer. Granted, the violent ones also attract more attention to themselves, so there's selection bias there, but even so.

Back to the present. In the wake of Arataka's recent arc, Reigen has made a point of laying off of Mob and going out of his way to be helpful to him in seemingly less cynical ways. As such, when Mob tells him he wants to spend the next week or so getting in shape for the big school marathon race, Arataka gives him the whole week off, and even shows up to help coach him (despite not knowing the first thing about running himself lol).

At least Dimple is enjoying himself.​

Mob is hoping that if he scores in the top ten runners, he'll be able to get the attention of that Tsubomi girl he's still crushing on. He initially wasn't planning on even trying to flaunt his athletic prowess until this time next year, but after realizing that academics are going to have to take priority by then he decided to go all in for this year's race. Dumb idea, but as far as middle schooler dumb ideas go it's far from the worst. We see how far he's come socially, as the body builder club - including the former delinquent Josuke Higashikata lookalike dude, now a respected and enthusiastic member of the jock squad - go all in themselves in helping him prep. Ritsu and Teru even offer Arataka to fill in for Mob for this next little while with the exorcism support.

Two little complications start to arise during this prep period. The first, is Ritsu realizing why Mob is doing this, and having reservations about his choice of romantic targets. There's an extremely funny bit that really nails it in terms of how infatuation - especially of the teenaged variety - can make you see people totally differently. For Ritsu, the only thought Tsubomi evokes is this childhood memory:

Heh.

Things get a bit more dramatic when Tsubomi and a friend of hers come into Spirits & Such to consult Arataka's prophetic services when it comes to their own love lives.

Ritsu hides himself from her, not wanting her to know that Mob's family has any connection to Arataka's business and potentially complicating things for him, but she nonetheless catches a glimpse of a photo on Reigen's wall that has Mob in it. After the consultation, she seems lost in thought. Not sure if this is due to Arataka's lingering bad reputation from the last arc, his lingering good reputation from the climax of the last arc, or something else entirely.

The other building plot thread in this episode is the Psycho Helmet Religion - those former Dimple-cultists who have since taken to worshipping Mob, and who recently got a major financial boost that they've made good use of building their assets and growing their membership.

They've managed to stalk their god's (very limited) internet presence to Salt Middle School, and that Mezato girl who's connected to them wants Mob to step up and actively take over the cult. Mostly because she thinks it would be interesting.

She knows the cult will be creeping on the middle school marathon race with literal camouflaged cameramen in the bushes, and so this would be a perfect moment for Mob to reveal himself. Take the race with an obvious, showy display of psychic power, in front of the witnesses who are expecting a sign.

Naturally, Mob refuses. In fact, it makes him double down on his insistence that he not use his powers at all in this race. He's been putting a lot of effort into building up his body this schoolyear, and he's not going to have done that for nothing.

So, the day of the marathon race comes. Predictably, Mob does NOT place in the top ten. He pushes himself hard, and harder still, in his determination to place without his powers. Early on in the race, he falls and hurts his leg, cutting his knee in almost the exact same spot as he did in that childhood incident in the teaser, which slows him further.

Arataka jogs over into the race (probably making himself look incredibly sketchy in the process) and encourages Mob to not hurt himself unnecessarily. Mob keeps pushing. Dimple offers to do his voluntary possession trick to boost Mob's stamina and pain tolerance. Mob brushes him off.

The stress mounts. The pain mounts. Eventually, Mob passes out on the pavement and has to be taken aside for treatment by the school nurse. At the time of his passing out, he was right around the middle of the other racers. His brother Ritsu, meanwhile, places in the top ten. Mob got nothing he wanted out of the race. He pushed himself to physical exhaustion and collapse. He hurt himself in a more serious version of the same way that triggered his powers as a kid. And his only reaction to learning all of this when he wakes back up, is...

Being happy for his brother.

Not even any percentage increases, not that those have exactly meant anything for a long time.

No power use, involuntary or otherwise.

...

Now, I said that this episode has a buried lede. And you might also notice that for all the framing and foreshadowing, none of these stressors really compare to the situations Mob has lived through since the pilot. He's been in combat before. He's been possessed and subjected to virtual reality torture before. So, it's kinda silly to expect anything that's happened in this episode so far to even rate on his stress index anymore.

But...once again, the fact that Mob Psycho 100 exists on these overlapping planes of existence where fighting demons and dealing with (sometimes extreme and violent, but also sometimes really sedate) middle school drama can have equivalent importance and stakes.

And that makes the other shoe that's about to drop a very interesting one.

...

When his family gets a call from the school saying that Mob is recovered and can be brought home now, Ritsu heads out to go pick him up. And is met at the door by that psychopathic child Claw member who teleported away at the end of season one.

When Mob comes home by himself a little while later, Dimple hovering alongside him, he finds his house aflame.

He goes inside, and is initially relieved to find no signs of his family having been inside (I'm a little confused about why he's using his powers to walk through the flames unhurt, but isn't using his powers to put them out. You'd think he'd want to get on that ASAP, right?). He manages to retain his zen, seeing that they don't appear to have been home when this happened.

Then he opens an upstairs bedroom, and finds their charred bodies pressed up against the door.

Immediately inducing a ???.

End episode.


So. How is the show going to play this? And, really, how is it going to play everything else after this? How is it going to be able to do those tonal reality shifts after an incident like this having happened, and demonstrated once and for all the difference between real consequences and unreal ones? Shown what really does and really doesn't constitute a breaking point for Mob?

Either Mob Psycho 100 is going to change so much as to be nearly unrecognizable, or it's going to lose my investment. It can't keep doing what it's been doing after this.

Unless, of course...

The Claw has faked the audience out before. This looks a lot less likely to be a fakeout (Mob is actually entering the house and seeing the corpses himself, rather than just having illusions relayed to him from the chinzilla guy, and we have outside confirmation that the Claw really did come here before Mob himself arrived), but it's still a faint possibility. After the thing with the Minecraft Twins, I can't help but regard any apparent display of lethal violence by the claw with scepticism.

In that case, there's still a problem. A smaller problem, but still significant. And also Mogami-shaped. The show has had at least a BRUSH with serious violence and harm since the previous Claw arc, during the Mogami sequence that tore a man's body open and put him in the hospital for months (rather than giving him a bunch of cartoony bruises and having him show up with bandaids the next day). Now that the possibility of real violence, real injury, and real death has been introduced, having the Claw threaten it but then NOT do it once again is just going to make them and everything related to them seem like a bullshit time-waste. I already thought that the previous Claw arc went on for much too long and had too little in the way of stakes, but that's just a small percentage of how tiresome I'm going to find them if this turns out to be another fakeout.

So, I'm really interested to see what happens. It's either going to be a fascinating transition for the series, or it's going to be fucking terrible. I don't see a third possibility.